Gaza will be entirely destroyed, Israeli minister says

Bear's Den feat. Dermot Kennedy - Above the Clouds of Pompeii

'Neo-nazis' boo Welcome to Country address at Melbourne Anzac Day dawn service

Trump and Netanyahu Steer Toward an Ugly World, Together

Bernie Sanders explains why a vote for Harris is the only choice...

Bernie's aiming this at any left-wing American who is thinking of not voting for Kamala Harris because she hasn't deviated from the Biden administration's stance on Gaza. While his logic and common-sense might not reach many Arab-Americans, there are young Americans who feel strongly about it, and there's also former DUers who I hope may be lurking and read this and reconsider their stance, especially if they're in one of the swing states. Take it from this Australian who dislikes your political system - a vote for a third party candidate this time round is a vote for Trump. If you're okay with that, then you can fuck right off and don't ever claim to have the best interests of the Palestinian people at heart.

His Mother Was Killed by Hamas. Her Death Transformed His Life.

It's too long for /TLDR folk, but for anyone else, it's very long, but well worth reading it all. Vivian Silver was a good woman who didn't deserve to be murdered like that,

The son of a peace activist brutally killed on Oct. 7 is determined to make sure that her dream for Israel does not die with her.

The day Vivian Silver’s home burned, her backyard was scattered with her grandchildren’s toys, a blue plastic boat upturned near a rubber duck. Vivian often spent days preparing for their visits, planning trips to the petting zoo and baking birthday cakes molded into the shape of a Barbie or a dinosaur. Her sons, Yonatan and Chen Zeigen, reminded her that she didn’t need to do so much, but Vivian measured her life by the way she made other people feel. The boys teased their mother: As a self-declared no-nonsense feminist, a renowned Israeli peace activist who was used to the sound of mortar fire, how had she stayed so soft?

Last year, in the days leading up to Oct. 7, Vivian was once again busily anticipating the arrival of Yonatan’s family from Tel Aviv. He and his partner, Maayan, would be packing their three floppy-haired children into the car for the familiar drive to his mother’s home in Kibbutz Be’eri, a desert village with socialist roots three miles from the border with Gaza. They were coming not only to celebrate Simchat Torah, the festival of the Bible, but also the 77th anniversary of the founding of the kibbutz.

But then Yonatan and Maayan changed their minds. It was time, they decided, to have their own private holiday. Be’eri, where they both grew up, was such a tight-knit community that a childhood nickname could stick to a person until they died. There, Yonatan would always be known as Vivian’s son. He wanted to separate himself: He and Maayan would build their own lives, create their own traditions. Yonatan, defiant and a little guilty, told his mother they wouldn’t be coming that day.

Twenty-four hours later, Yonatan woke up in Tel Aviv to the sound of sirens. Opening WhatsApp, he learned that hundreds of Hamas militants had crossed the border. Many of them had surged into his mother’s kibbutz.

Vivian, that morning, was utterly herself. Hiding in her safe room, as fighters came down her street, she cracked god-awful jokes in text messages to Yonatan. “Say something,” he wrote. “Something,” she replied. “I’m trying to keep my sense of humor.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/magazine/vivian-silver-oct-7.html?unlocked_article_code=1.O04.DTZX.SoH5YrWX8HQO&smid=url-share

Rogue to Victim: What Australia Sees in Julian Assange

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.

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This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

PART I.
IMPUNITY

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.
Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-west-bank-settler-violence-impunity.html (for subscribers)

https://archive.md/x7KuY#selection-779.0-793.1079 (non paywall link)

Trump's indictment sets a concerning precedent for corrupt men everywhere

From The Chaser:

Dear readers,

America’s 45th president Donald J Trump was indicted just hours ago for taking classified and top secret documents to his residence in Mar-a-Lago, potentially setting an extremely concerning precedent of actually punishing powerful cis-white men for crimes.

Donald Trump was one of the world's best corrupt businessmen and pussy grabbers, people like that are the backbone of the entire political and justice system. If we set the precedent that men like him can be held responsible for their actions, who knows what sort of chaotic world that could cause?

This is the start of a very slippery slope. Indicting former presidents for federal crimes, what next, actually investigating powerful men for tax evasion, sexual assault or war crimes? Where does the madness end?

The US Justice Department claim to have found illegally held documents and recordings of Trump acknowledging that he was committing an alleged crime, but in his defence, who hasn’t stolen stationery supplies or classified information from work?

Here at The Chaser we hope that the system works as it was designed to and justice is served, where the powerful cis-white man gets away with whatever he allegedly did then gets to sue anyone who commented on the allegations, because clearly it is the journalists and random social media users who need to be punished.

https://mailchi.mp/chaser.com.au/trumps-indictment

Television was one of my first great loves...

I've still got Marquee Moon and Adventure on vinyl though I haven't listened to them for ages and don't have a turntable.

RIP Tom